FOr, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with news broadcasts. At least, that’s how I used to be. I woke up to the babbling of Radio 4’s Today program and for the rest of the day was bombarded with erratic sound effects from the Middle East, Trumpland, PMQs and the odd loud phone call.
It was a habit formed long before I became a journalist. My father was a doctor and was passionately interested in current events. “What’s going on?” he asked at breakfast. When you start talking about your plans for the day, he listens politely and says, “I mean, what’s going on in the world?”
So being a news junkie seemed normal to me. One day a few months ago, I burst into tears while watching a broadcast.
I was aware that this sensory overload was taking its toll. A while ago, I completed a mindfulness-based stress reduction course created by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a renowned guru of secular meditation. To be honest, I thought it was boring, but there was one exercise that really stood out to me. We were instructed to try 20 minutes of meditation at different times of the day and record our experience with each meditation. It was a shock to find that even hours after reading the breaking news, as I sat still, my consciousness was filled with anxiety about people, places, and things.
This discovery bothered me, but it also evoked a sense of self-righteousness. “Yes, it has a negative impact, but we should all be concerned about the suffering of others.” But in the end, all the I decided to completely ban current events and radio for a week. It wasn’t easy. Especially when I keep tapping the BBC Sounds app in zombie mode first thing in the morning. But the effects were immediate. It felt like I had finally stopped banging my head against a brick wall.
Admittedly, it took some time to adjust. I felt calm, but I also felt a sense of empty anticipation. What was happening in the world? Rather than continue without thinking about it, I decided to set aside an hour each day to read print. I found myself focusing more clearly on the facts and less caught up in fear and drama.
This may sound easy, but it actually wasn’t that easy. I realized how much I was in the habit of listening to the news, reading the newspaper, and doomscrolling at the same time. I’ve found that when I force myself to focus on just one thing, I can more easily remember the details of what I’ve read. I also felt a strange sense of satisfaction. I knew there were studies that showed multitasking was the enemy of productivity, but I always chose to ignore it.
After the first week, we decided to make the trial permanent with a few adjustments. One example is the return of his daily 5pm show with Evan Davies on Radio 4’s PM show. No matter how grim the headlines were, I always found his calm voice and wry observations soothing.
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This new approach made me question the usefulness of trying to care about too much. This is the theme that Oliver Berkman tackles in his new book, Meditations for Mortals. In a chapter titled “You Can’t Care About Everything: About Staying Sane When the World Is in turmoil,” he writes about the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. He writes that it was the first time he realized how his relationship with current events had changed.
“Certainly it wasn’t just that people were addicted to doomscrolling; it was that they were starting to live in the news,” Berkman says. “The news had become the psychological center of their lives, somehow more real than the world of home, friends, and work, where they only dropped in sporadically before returning to the main event.”
That was the real problem with my news habits. It gave me the illusion that I was doing something. Immediately after making the big switch, I started brainstorming ways to contribute to the causes I care about most. I came up with three ideas: volunteering, going on a sponsored run, and selling unwanted items and donating the proceeds to charity. Now that it’s no longer all about consuming the news, I feel like I have the ability to make small but tangible changes in the real world. Also, I no longer cry while watching TV.
